1.

Above the surface, I dream: an allegory of a maze, and I am the eroding bone, the poet, the womb, the being dreamed through birth, being born, borne away from, sentenced to words words words, remembrance and momentum, the mad eye of the fourth person singular, whose weight I wake from now, I am awake, and waking from waking into irreversible learning, mind turning back on itself: an unbeginning, a seedling conceived like an open secret, and my need for a new ground in which this eye is I, is I am, and has no need to go blind? That is the word escaping exile, poetry waking through language, the poem conjugating the song I am.

2.

The bird’s quick call. Decomposing into something else. Self-loosened. Unhorizoned. Between source and target. Between yawning fire of transformation and pure form: the flowering ember. Remember? Inaudible music. Listened for. Like water passing between worlds. To become presence. Born. Rooting. Routing the silences.

3.

Flown towards, and forward. The meniscus of history crystallizing its burden: to free the Word from its saying. Beginningness now its own transformation, its own self-naming. Verbs, voice, the conditions of pure form. A hallowing. Homer, Tiresias, Oedipus, blind. Beethoven, deaf. The madness of witnessing. Spell it out. Between desire and remembrance the meniscus breaks, and history is this untilled ground, each thing’s threshold and center, named and found.

4.

A mouth cannot breathe, but splits open. Its cry is waking. To wake, to transgress the word, to conjugate worlds, to say and call itself Thou? Inhaled. Inspired. Inaudible silence I cannot hold, absence that I am not. What are these gravities swimming through me? The clumsiness of all this. The singular I, brink between margins: Here/now, where/when. How can I find the nothing I am? Thou, ground and grounding, the white target. Emptied. (We too.) Dissolved.

5.

I dream I am sediment decomposing on the seabed. The tides choke in. And the dream, through its thin surface, splits open. Nightmare, maelstrom. The man, the poet, the child, given beginningness, dreams of generations untamed by time, borne and yet unborn. Other half that I am not — touched, crumbling — I grasp again. I remember only my own heart. Glance back, darkness. Stare ahead, blackness. I maddened for body. Inner famine, drought, spit droplets streaking like silver arrows. This, the offence of poetry. To break the dream. To become through language, all eye. 

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